SAP’s Managed Mobility Solution and the Value it Offers Businesses

I am often asked why an organization should consider a managed mobility service (MMS) when it is planning for mobility, and why it should specifically consider SAP’s MMS solution. Let me first tell you why an MMS approach to managing enterprise mobility is so valuable in today’s business and technology climate.

Anyone who is tasked with managing mobile IT today faces a number of challenges. To effectively manage mobile infrastructure, IT managers must adopt an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution that is capable of supporting the great variety of mobile devices being brought into the workplace, and they must develop the capacity to build apps that will run on all these devices. This includes tracking and staying current with all the device operating system changes that happen so frequently. IT managers must also assure secure mobile access to legacy data systems. IT managers need to scale all these support efforts across the breadth of the organization. Whether you are a small company or a global one, building your own mobility infrastructure represents a skills development issue and a time-to-value issue.

Now consider a managed mobility service, which is essentially a cloud based EMM platform delivered as a service. The service provider is a business staffed by people whose job it is to stay on top of the latest iOS, Android, Windows 8 and other operating system changes, people who are experts in developing mobile applications, experts in securing data on all kinds of mobile devices, and people who are experts at integrating mobile and fixed business operations. By signing a single service level agreement, you instantly have access to a mobility infrastructure that is right-sized to your business needs. So, what is the value of that?

The value is really twofold. One is when you first make the investment – the entry cost is lower. The other is time-to-value, where you don’t have to wait six months before you see the actual first device with the first application running, but you can see that in six weeks because the partner, who already has the platform installed, can focus on configuration, customizing the mobile applications, and connecting to your back end systems. With the MMS service provider, the technology and skills are already in place.

This time-to-value consideration, especially when we are talking about mobile operations, is extremely important. When IT managers are mostly thinking in terms of ROI on the technology investment, they often totally miss the essential point. Time-to-value here means time to value of mobile business operations, which is a much larger equation than initial costs. It’s about how quickly you can realize mobility advantage. It’s about owning the business opportunity, and being more competitive. It’s about changing business processes to be more productive. Will it take the traditional 18 months of development, user acceptance tests, and then phased rollout before I actually get to transform my business? Or can I adopt these new technologies in such a way that I can transform my business within the quarter? Taking a year or more out of the business transformation plan can be huge.

The other part of the value question is this. What special value is offered by SAP’s managed mobility solution? The value is based on the fact that SAP’s MMS solution is delivered through a global network of top-tier partners. Many of these partners are mobile network operators, and many are system integrators who also support SAP’s large portfolio of business operations management software. SAP’s MMS solution provides a natural path to mobility for existing SAP customers. However, it also provides the entire stack of mobile technology through partners, from device management to content management, from development platform to a suite of mobile applications, and from third party mobile apps to custom applications, and from any data source SAP and non-SAP.

The reality today is that regardless the size of a business, mobility is a relevant technology. A managed mobility service offers the best way to quickly realize value from a mobility strategy. SAP’s clear leadership in enterprise mobility with end-to-end solutions approach offered through a global network of service provider partners is capable of supporting any growth scenario. That is the unique value that SAP’s MMS solution can provide to businesses that are developing their mobility strategies.